A few years ago, when I was around twenty three, I had finally achieved the job that everyone had been pointing me towards since I was in school. I was a graduate consultant in Leeds, and I’d picked that job from four other offers. I finally had received a taste of the success that everyone was talking about, and I felt that my family were proud of me.
But a year in, I felt empty. I was healthy on paper but I was sick, surrounded by friends but lonely, and working hard at something that meant nothing to me. I’d spent my life up until this point scraping through to meet a standard that was not my own. And I started to understand that I did not want to live on someone else’s terms.
What changed was really belief. I stopped thinking the answer was out there, in a better job or someone else’s way, and I stopped believing you have to do what you don’t love to earn a living. What I was looking for was already in me, and my dreams had been showing me every night.
When I started meditating, it gave my mind space, and that space made me hungry to understand who I was.
Then I discovered dreamwork and Jungian work, and this showed me the parts of myself I’d shut away, and the ones I’d never let come to the surface.
What I do now
Now I work with the whole person: body, mind, relationships and dreams, never one piece on its own, always holistic and considering the whole, unique person.
It’s because of this I always start with what something means to you uniquely, not what a book says it should mean.
I am a CHEK practitioner and a dreamwork specialist, and I have kept a dream journal since October 2023. I am not a therapist, and nothing I make is therapy. If a feeling is heavy or will not shift, talk to a doctor or therapist too.
Where DreamOS comes from
You have a vast community inside of you, and every night they stage a play for you. Every app I tried read the dream for me first, then gave me a paragraph it would have given anyone. DreamOS is what I wanted instead, a place where you can finally listen to them. It asks you who they are and what each of them means to you before it offers a reflection, because you are the only one who has ever met them, and then it remembers, so that each dream builds on the ones before, and the Mind Codex fills in one dream at a time, because for me it has to be your meaning, not a dictionary’s.
I’m sharing my story for the people who look “successful” on paper and feel empty inside, so they can find their own north star and build a life that is actually theirs.
Find me
I write at The Unified Way on Substack, and I am on Instagram as @theunifiedway_. If you want to talk about dreams, or about working together, write to me at [email protected].
DreamOS opens on 17 November, Sydney time. Join the early circle, it’s free to begin, and you can bring your next dream with you.